[edanm]

When faced with sending email from my app, I chose to outsource everything, in order to not learn this stuff..

I set up an account at PostMark (postmarkapp.com), which made it very simple to start sending emails. I did have to change a few DNS settings, but they explained exactly how, and after that everything was a breeze.

I really recommend them to anyone who doesn't want to learn this stuff. It's pretty cheap too (I'm on the free tier so far, but it's a few bucks for a 1000 emails).

[tomjen3]

I looked into PostMark, but sendgrid is less than 1/10 of the price, so I am not quite sure why anybody would stay with postmark.

[malyk]

Sendgrid would not reliably send our emails fast enough. We were getting queued for any gmail address we were sending too and sendgrid told us that there was nothing they could do about it. Since we have a requirement to get into peoples inbox ASAP we bailed on them as they couldn't help.

Then we went to critsend, which was great until we ran into a problem and couldn't get in touch with customer service for a week (and they never got back to us).

Then we tried Dyn since they called us up after reading a press hit and offered us a free trial period. Things were good there until we found out we couldn't deliver to comcast.com email addresses. Again, they were no help.

So we switched to Postmark and things have been awesome. Yes, you pay more than some other places, but your email gets to you recipients and it does so fast.

And yes, we had our DNS configured configured correctly for each of those services.

[edanm]

Good point. I looked into SendGrid, but went with PostMark afterwards. It was easier to set up.

The reason, if I recall, is that SendGrid made emails come out with a "sent via SendGrid" header, which I didn't like. To remove it, I'd have had to sign up for a paid deal with SendGrid. PostMark let me get things working first, then decide whether to pay or not.

[ajtaylor]

When implementing Sendgrid, I think I spent about 30 min reading over the DNS setup docs and 30 min actually creating the records. I'm no sysadmin, but I thought it was quite easy.

Also, they have a free account which allows you to send 200 emails per month. That would allow you to try it out and then decide that Yes Virginia, it is worth the money. :)

[dennyferra]

Is Amazon Simple Email Services an option?

[riobard]

It sure is.

We are currently using Postmark to send notifications to our users. Postmark does not allow bulk emails like newsletters, and our user count is way beyond the ceiling of Newsberry (Postmark's bulk sending service). Yes, we could negotiate a deal with them, but it's just not as transparent as we want it to be. Frankly, having to worry about the number of subscribers is kinda painful for a fast-growing startup---we cannot predict how many more users we will get next month!

Not to mention the price of Postmark is 15x that of Amazon SES. It's not a big deal for a small amount of emails, but it accumulates pretty quickly when we need to send frequent updates, weekly newsletters, and occasionally campaign messages. We have our own analytic systems and template designers, which make Postmark's value added services useless for us (keep in mind that's not to say it's useless to you).

What we need is a reliable and affordable mailing service with a flat, per use fee. Amazon SES fits the bill nicely. We rolled out a new delivery system using SES and just finished sending a testing batch of newsletters. Simple put, SES is amazing: bounce rate is well below 0.2%, almost no complaints, and zero rejects for a 100k batch! We will test a few more times later, and if everything goes well like this, we will completely switch over to SES.

[mnutt]

It is; we use it and it is very reasonably priced. However their APIs are very painful to work with and there is no web interface.